Magazines May Soon Be Available on iPad

In recent years, more and more print articles have become extinct and available only online. I don't know whether to be sorry, or excited.

Apple wants to make newspaper and magazine subscriptions available on iTunes and has been messing around with this idea for a while now. Even before the iPad was launched.

Some publishing companies released an iPad version of their work to go along with the iPad's release. Time Inc. was one of them.

Of course it seems like a bright idea, but after you think about it, the question is money. Print and online subscriptions go for $4-$5, and when you can get it for less through database subscriptions or iTunes. Publishing companies like to use their database subscriptions to gain customers and advertisers.

Apple takes a 30% revenue on everything it sells on iTunes, and hopes to do the same with periodicals.

The iPad has hopes of making magazines and newspapers more engaging to the audience rather than just the glossy finish on the print version. Publishers hope that Apple's iTunes will help increase sales since songs, video, and other downloads do very well.

iTunes still has a small amount of books, but the iPad will allow a much better experience which will increase the amount of e-books in the future.

It makes me wonder what will take place of the magazine racks at the check out. Maybe Amazon's Kindle and Barnes and Noble's Nook will follow. This is just another step towards less print articles.

Go Green?

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Become Friends With Your Computer

When making friends, it's important to learn about their particular qualities. If you really want to get close to a friend, you must figure out what's inside of them as well. Be friends with your computer.


Instead of taking everything you see on the screen for granted, learn to change and edit webpages to your liking.


Journalists will increasingly find the need for skills that computer science departments are teaching.


The article, "Hack Into Hackers," by Nicholas Carlson, points out that it's the new journalist's job to learn "enough computer science and software engineering to be able to design tools for information gathering, synthesis, analysis and circulation." Basically to do everything that is involved with being a journalist.


Because of the evolving news world, journalists aren't sticking to one area of reporting. Traditional news jobs are going to becoming less prevalent where internet blogs and microblogging sites are gaining on their audiences.


In the reading, "technology firms like Yahoo and Google" are mentioned as examples of how man, technology and journalism have teamed up to make a power trio.

HTML codes can be used to do just about anything on the internet from editing a YouTube video to making your very own webpage.


By learning how to code on the  computer, you can more easily brand yourself as a journalist and improve your search engine optomization.


Being a new journalist means a more demanding workload and a whole new set of skills required to even begin the job. It is necessary now and will become more necessary in the future to aquire these and various other computer skills to be successful.


Get comfortable in your seat and give your computer a name because in no time you'll be making great friends.

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Social Media in Journalism: What's the Future?

As social media continues to evolve into an everyday necessity for people across the globe, journalists are the ones who are having to learn and evolve the most with the changes. Journalists are having to learn how to use more than just a notepad and a pen but rather online tools like Facebook and Twitter are an essential part of a journalists proverbial "bag of tricks."

In the article "The Future of Social Media in Journalism" by Vadim Lavrusik, he explains what many professors and journalists feel is the future of social media and journalism. According to Lavrusik social media in journalism will eventually see the "death of social media." He goes on to say that "all media as we know it today will become social, and feature a social component to one extent or another."

The article lays out many great points about the future of journalism and social media which I could not agree more with.

I agree that collaborative reporting has and will become more integrated. Sources and journalists will both have their hands in the stories they report and give info to. Also journalists will be more involved with the community they cover. The article mentions that newsrooms will be built to "focus on utilizing the community and enabling its members its members to be enrolled as correspondents." I feel as if this is a great point. With they way social media is now, people are already acting as journalists when they report news via Twitter. It's just the way things are now and like it or not we are all journalists if we want to be.

I'm not saying that social media is killing true journalists. I feel the world still needs true journalists.

The article makes a good point of how journalists will become community managers. Instead of journalists telling the people what they need to know, journalists and the community engage in conversation about news and journalists manage these conversations while still gathering traditional news stories.

Other things the article ponders are how social media is essentially the new news editor in the world of journalism.

Alfred Hermida, a professor of integrated journalism at the University of British Colombia is quoted in the article as saying "Platforms like Twitter can turn our social network into our editor. Once this role was the preserve of a newspaper editor, who decided what the public should read that morning. Now people can turn to their social networks to find out, 'what do my friends or people I respect think I should read about this morning.'"

Throughout the article there are topics covered that one can say are already beginning to happen throughout the world of journalism. As journalists we need to strive to change and grow with the new concept of media becoming completely social. There really is no room to resist the change, its either roll with the punches or die trying to resist them. I would strongly suggest that others heed these thoughts and concepts in this article by Lavrusik in order to keep growing with the new concept of journalism today.

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Twitter: Where It's Been and Where It'll Go

A lot of things in life begin with an idea and are molded and changed until they have a true purpose. The social networking site, Twitter, is one of those things.

Last week, Christopher Isaac (more commonly known as Biz Stone), the co-founder of Twitter visited Ball State. He led a forum event discussing "Twitter's rocky beginning and his plans to make the site a more useful information source", as explained in this article.

Stone never finished college, as he dropped out to work with book cover designing. He became a Web entrepreneur when he founded Xanga, a social networking site. He met Evan Williams and they became business partners as they created Odeo, one of the first podcast companies.

Eventually this site developed into the social networking site which would become Twitter.

Stone and Williams realized the potential of their site in 2007, when they noticed attendees at a festival using Twitter to invite each other to different places around the convention. It appeared that the site was making the humans flock like animals, and that's how they decided on the name Twitter.

In 2009 they noticed Twitter was critical for media and world leaders to share information on the situation in Iran. Stone stated "Twitter can be a complementary source for news because it offers the first bit of information in 140 characters, leaving the media to develop the full story."

Today Twitter has over 165 million registered accounts.

With so much success already, Stone wants to continue shaping Twitter into a tool to help people find information that's relevant to them right now. He says there are plenty of applications that will help this process along.

Stone wrapped it up saying, "I don't know what they (the untapped used for Twitter) are yet. I think a lot of it's going to be our job in trying to unlock it, by creating more relevance, by helping discovery and helping serendipity.

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M.I.A. Dislikes Red Headed Reporters

In 2007 M.I.A. came out with her hit single Paper Planes only to loose her fans by creating a controversial music video. A New York Times reporter by the name of Lynn Hirschberg retaliated for redheads everywhere.

M.I.A.'s music Video "Born Free" was essentially a redhead genocide video with rock music playing in the background.

Lane wrote an article expressing her opinion about the video calling M.I.A. a ginger hater. M.I.A. retaliated by posting Lane's phone number to twitter. In an Interview Lane said she was not surprised that M.I.A. would do that.

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